What’s wrong with desire? – The Economic Times


The understanding of need is of great significance. There is the outward need, necessary and essential, food, clothes and shelter; but beyond that, is there any other need? Each one is caught up in the turmoil of inward needs, but are they essential? The need for sex, the need to fulfil, the compulsive urge of ambition, envy, greed, are they the way of life? The inward needs, which seem to have no end, multiply, change and continue. This is the source of contradictory and burning desire.

Desire is always there; only the objects of desire change, diminish or multiply. To understand it completely, not to suppress it, not to discipline it out of all recognition is to understand need. Need and desire go together, like fulfilment and frustration. There’s no noble or ignoble desire but only desire, ever in conflict within itself. The hermit and the party boss are burning with it, call it by different names but it is there, eating away the heart of things.

When there is total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has quite a different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought, and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame, life itself is lost.

It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end.



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